Jean Carteron

(Courtesy of Steria)

Jean Carteron has been a central witness to and influential actor in the history of computing in France. Trained as a telecom engineer in the late 1940s, he developed scientific computing at Electricité de France. In 1963 he moved to the computer services sector, first as a director within SEMA and then as an entrepreneur when he founded his own company, Steria, which he headed from 1969 to the end of the century.¹ He was simultaneously active in national and international learned societies such as the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).

An engineer in the post-war reconstruction

Born in 1926 to a modest family of Parisian shopkeepers, Jean Carteron was admitted at the Ecole Polytechnique in 1945. His military service as a Signal Corps officer helped him discover the new, exciting field of electronics, after which he completed his education at the Ecole Nationale des Télécommunications. He did not want to devote his life to maintaining the obsolete French telephone system of that time, but rather to becoming a research engineer. Thus in 1950, he joined the Centre National d'Etudes des Télécommunications (CNET), hoping to participate in transistor R&D. Instead, he was put in charge of a computing bureau equipped with Monroe desk machines to calculate telephone filters.²

After two years of this boring work, he was hired by Electricité de France (EDF) to create an electronic computing service. This job installed him at the heart of the French post-war modernization. EDF was a powerful state monopoly created by the nationalizations of 1945, where young engineers were given much leeway and considerable resources to develop hydroelectricity and nuclear energy, in close cooperation with economist-mathematicians (also Polytechnique alumni) who worked on operation research and marginal cost problems. The demand for computing grew fast, and it was met with the Bull and IBM machines of that era, as well as with SEA differential analyzers. Carteron's first papers compared the respective merits of digital and analog technologies.³ His mind was clear about that since, in 1954, he was one of the few Frenchmen who visited Maurice Wilkes' EDSAC team in Cambridge, UK, to learn about stored-program computers. In 1962, he switched from research work to a more administrative position within EDF, in charge of coordinating the scientific computing and data processing departments. When Carteron left EDF in 1963, he bequeathed to his successors one of the largest computing centers in continental Europe, which still exists today.

Meanwhile, Carteron had become an active social networker. In 1957, with other computer pioneers, he created the Association Française de Calcul (AFCAL) and its journal Chiffres. Two years later, he was a key negotiator and organizer of the International Conference on Information Processing Societies, which was the founding event of IFIP.⁴ The Paris UNESCO conference in June 1959 gathered 1,800 participants from 38 countries. Carteron remained a French representative to IFIP until 1981, acting as treasurer and general secretary (1965-1969). He also chaired AFCAL twice, favoring the broadening of its scope from scientific computing to information processing as well as its merger with other French learned societies devoted to operation research and automatic control. Its name was changed to AFCET to include these activities.⁵

Background of Jean Carteron

Born: 8 March 1926, Paris, France.

Education: Ecole Polytechnique, 1945; Ecole Nationale des Télécommunications, 1948.

Professional Experience: Head of CNET's telephone filters computing bureau, 1950-1952. Director of the Computing Service, then of the Mathematical and Nuclear studies at Electricité de France, 1952-1962. CEO of SACS (Société d'Analyse et de Conception de Systèmes, SEMA Group), 1963-1969. Chairman of Steria (Société d'Etude et de Ré alisation en Informatique et Automatisme), 1969-1998.

Learned societies: Chairman of AFCALTI/AFCET (French Computing Society), 1961, 1978; treasurer and general secretary of IFIP, 1965-1969.

Honors and Awards: Ordre National du Mérite.

Carteron was also committed to teaching, at a time when computing hesitantly emerged as an academic discipline.^5a Universities lacked competent teachers...